The Lady from Zagreb

Six

Early on the first morning of the conference I took the S-Bahn back to Wannsee and walked to the villa. It was another warm day and by the time I arrived there my white shirt was sticking to my back and I almost wished I had my own staff Mercedes. I was certainly the only officer arriving at the villa who seemed not to have one. Well-polished cars played tag in the driveway, delivering their self-important passengers while, at the back of the house, on a terrace that faced the lake, thirty or forty officers wearing lounge suits and a variety of foreign bandbox uniforms were smoking cigarettes, talking, and drinking cups of coffee. It was all very clubbable and you’d hardly have believed there was a war on.

In front of the Greek Revival entrance there were flower beds full of blue geraniums. In the conservatory the fountain had been turned back on but someone had thoughtfully removed all copies of Das Schwarze Korps from the library, as even a cursory glance through its morbid pages might have encouraged any reader to doubt that Germany was winning the war in the east, as Dr. Goebbels insisted it was.

On display underneath the curving staircase in the main hall was a bronze of Heydrich’s death mask, which made him seem oddly benign. With eyes closed, his head looked as if it had been on display at the old panopticum in Lindenpassage, or perhaps recovered from the basket under the guillotine at Brandenburg, for display in a glass case at the police museum. On an easel next to the death mask was a large facsimile of the sixty-pfennig stamp featuring a photograph of the death mask that the occupation government planned to use on letters in Bohemia and Moravia, which was a bit like hanging a portrait of Bluebeard in a girls’ school dormitory.

Staring critically at the mask and the giant stamp was a very tall man and next to him was a junior officer; from the monkey swing on his shoulder I took him to be the taller man’s aide-de-camp. I advanced a short way up the staircase until I was standing immediately above them and, in the vague hope of hearing something interesting about Stiftung Nordhav, I started to eavesdrop on their conversation. My conscience might be getting a bit dull these days, but there’s nothing wrong with my hearing. Their wisecracks were all taken from the SS joke book, which — take my word for it — only the SS think is funny.

“That’s one stamp I won’t be putting on my fucking Christmas cards,” said the senior officer. I guessed him to be almost two meters in height.

“Not if you want the card to get there in time for Christmas,” said the aide.

“Hardly matters, does it? We’ve made Christmas illegal in Bohemia.”

Both men laughed unpleasantly.

“They were going to put a picture of Lidice on the ten-pfennig stamp,” said the aide, “until someone told them that there was nothing actually left to photograph. Just a lost shoe and a lot of empty brass cartridges.”

“I just wish he was here to see it,” said the senior officer. “Just so I could see the look on his goat’s face. Strange-looking bugger, Heydrich. Didn’t you think so? He looks like a Paris perfumer, inhaling some rare scent.”

“Death, probably. The scent which fills that long nose. His death, thank God.”

The senior officer laughed. “Very good, Werner,” he said. “Very good.”

“Do you think he really was a Jew, sir? Like they say?”

“No, it was Himmler who put that rumor into circulation. To deflect attention from his own very questionable origins.”

“Really?”

“Keep it under your hat, Werner, but his real name is Heymann, and he’s half Jew.”

“Christ.”

“Heydrich knew that. He had a whole file on the Heymann family. The slippery bastard. Still, anyone could be forgiven for thinking Heydrich was a Jew. I mean, look at that fucking nose. It’s straight out of Der Stürmer.”

I’d never liked Heydrich, but I’d certainly feared him. It was impossible not to fear a man like Heydrich. And I wondered if these two would have made such openly critical remarks about the former Protector of Bohemia if the general had still been alive. I rather doubted it. At least I did until the senior officer looked around and I realized exactly who he was. I’d only ever seen a picture of him but he was a hard man to forget: there were so many scars on the bedrock of his craggy face that they might almost have been left there by a glacier retreating from the moraine of his forbidding personality. It was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the man rumored to be the next head of the RSHA. The Swiss clinic had dried him out sooner than anyone would have supposed possible.

I went up to the next floor to have a nose-around. There was a long narrow corridor of doors and on one of them were painted the words STIFTUNG NORDHAV and EXPORT DRIVES G.M.B.H. PRIVATE. I was just about to try the handle when an SS major came out the door. He was accompanied by a tall foreign-looking officer who, from the kepi under his arm, I thought might have been French, until I saw the little crosses on his buttons. I guessed he might be Swiss.

“As before, we’ll do the deal through Export Drives,” the major was saying. “That was the company we used for the purchase of the machine guns.”

“I remember,” said the Swiss.

Their conversation stopped abruptly when they saw me.

“Can I help you?” asked the SS major.

“No. I was just looking for somewhere quiet to gather my thoughts. I’m the morning’s first speaker, worse luck.”

“Good luck,” he said, and locked the door behind him.

The two men went downstairs and out onto the terrace and, at a distance, I followed.

Half a kilometer away to the east and across the lake, at Strandbad Wannsee, hundreds of Berliners were arriving at the city’s favorite lido for a day on the beach, reserving their wicker beach chairs, or spreading their towels on eighty meters of pristine white sand. There was a light breeze that stirred the blue flags on top of the two-story clinker-brick promenade and which carried the sound of the PA system already announcing a lost child to the unconcerned ears of those who were present at the villa: Frenchmen, Italians, Danes, Croatians, Romanians, Swedes, and Swiss. What was happening on the beach seemed a very long way from what I was there to talk about.

“Feeling nervous?” Arthur Nebe smiled and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Yes. I was just wishing I was over there, on that beach talking to some pretty girl.”

“Did you get anywhere with that schoolteacher we saw at the Swedish Pavilion? What was her name?”

“Kirsten? Yes. A little. I know where she works. And more importantly, where she lives. In Krumme Strasse. I even know that she goes swimming two nights a week at the local bathhouse.”

“As always you make romance sound like a murder inquiry.” Nebe shook his head and smiled. “If you’ll permit me. You have a piece of toilet paper stuck to your chin.” He picked it off my face and let it flutter to the ground.

“I wondered why people were looking at me so strangely on the S-Bahn. They were thinking, ‘Nobody else in this city seems to have any toilet paper, how come he does?’”

“You need a cognac,” said Nebe, and took me back into the villa, where he found a drink for us both. “We both do. It’s a little early, I know, even for me. But the truth is I’m feeling a little nervous myself. I’ll be glad when this is over and I get back to some real work.”

I wondered what that would amount to for a man like Arthur Nebe.

“Strange, isn’t it?” he said. “After all we went through in Minsk. Crazy Ivans all over the place trying to kill you and it’s something like this that really squeezes your guts.”

I glanced out the window where Reichsführer Himmler was now speaking to State Secretary Gutterer. Walter Schellenberg was talking to Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Müller.

“That’s hardly a surprise when you consider the guest list.”

I took a large sip of the brandy.

“Relax,” insisted Nebe. “If your speech goes down like shit we’ll just blame the whole thing on Leo Gutterer. It’s about time someone took that awful man down a peg.”

“I thought you wanted me to fuck up, Arthur.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You did.”

“I was joking, of course. Look, all I really want is never to be IKPK president again. Next year this is all going to be Kaltenbrunner’s problem. Not mine and not yours. You’ll be safely out of the way in the War Crimes Bureau and I’ll just be safely out of the way, I hope. Switzerland, if they’ll have me. Or Spain. I always wanted to go to Spain. Admiral Canaris loves it there. And by the way, just in case you were wondering, I’m still joking.”

“A sense of humor. That’s nice. I think we need that just to get up in the morning.”

Nebe threw back his cognac and then pulled a face. “Anyway, you’ll be fine. I’ve every confidence that you’re going to be the most interesting speaker of the day.”

I nodded and glanced around. “It’s a beautiful house.”

“Designed by Hitler’s favorite architect. Paul Baumgarten.”

“I thought that was Speer.”

“So did Speer, I think. But it seems he was wrong about that, too.”

“Who owns it now?”

“We do. The SS does. Although God knows why. We’ve got several houses around here. The Havel Institute. The Horticultural School.”

“Since when were the SS interested in horticulture?”

“I think it’s a home, for Jews,” said Nebe. “The forced laborers who work on the gardens round here.”

“That sounds almost benign. And the Havel Institute?”

“A radio HQ that directs spy and sabotage operations against the Soviet Union.” Nebe shrugged. “There are probably more houses that even I don’t know about. Frankly, the state has so many houses coming into public ownership that the Ministry of the Interior could open its own sales and lettings agency. Maybe I’ll do that instead of being a policeman.”

“So it’s not the Nordhav Foundation that owns this house.”

“What do you know about the Nordhav Foundation?”

“Not much. There’s an office upstairs with that name on the door. Apart from that, not much. That’s why I asked.” I shrugged.

“Where Nordhav is concerned, nothing is always the best thing to know. Take my advice, Bernie. Stick to homicide. It’s a lot safer.” Nebe glanced around as the delegates started to file into the central hall where the speeches were to be given. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”